OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Design of a High-Performance Tomographic Tactile Sensor by Manipulating the Detector Conductivity
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in soft robots, human-machine interfaces, and wearable electronics have led to an increased demand for high-performance soft tactile sensors. Tomographic tactile sensor based on resistive coupling is a novel contact pressure imaging method that allows the use of an arbitrary conductive material in a detector. However, the influence of material properties on the sensing performance remains unclear and the efficient and appropriate selection of materials is difficult. In this study, the relationship between the conductivity distribution of the material used as a detector and the sensing performance including sensitivity, force range, spatial resolution, and position accuracy is clarified to develop a high-performance tomographic tactile sensor. The performance maps reveal that a material with a conductivity of approximately 0.2 S/m can serve as an effective detector for touch interactions involving a force range of several Newtons. Additionally, incorporating gradient conductivity in the cross-section of the detector and multi-layer conductive porous media with anisotropic conductive bonding can help expand the design flexibility for enhanced performance. Based on these findings, various tomographic tactile sensors for soft grippers, tangible input interfaces, flexible touch displays, and wearable electronics are demonstrated by using a conductive porous media.
ATTIQA: Generalizable Image Quality Feature Extractor using Attribute-aware Pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), the challenge of limited dataset sizes hampers the development of robust and generalizable models. Conventional methods address this issue by utilizing large datasets to extract rich representations for IQA. Also, some approaches propose vision language models (VLM) based IQA, but the domain gap between generic VLM and IQA constrains their scalability. In this work, we propose a novel pretraining framework that constructs a generalizable representation for IQA by selectively extracting quality-related knowledge from VLM and leveraging the scalability of large datasets. Specifically, we select optimal text prompts for five representative image quality attributes and use VLM to generate pseudo-labels. Numerous attribute-aware pseudo-labels can be generated with large image datasets, allowing our IQA model to learn rich representations about image quality. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple IQA datasets and exhibits remarkable generalization capabilities. Leveraging these strengths, we propose several applications, such as evaluating image generation models and training image enhancement models, demonstrating our model's real-world applicability.
PRICE: A Pretrained Model for Cross-Database Cardinality Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Cardinality estimation (CardEst) is essential for optimizing query execution plans. Recent ML-based CardEst methods achieve high accuracy but face deployment challenges due to high preparation costs and lack of transferability across databases. In this paper, we propose PRICE, a PRetrained multI-table CardEst model, which addresses these limitations. PRICE takes low-level but transferable features w.r.t. data distributions and query information and elegantly applies self-attention models to learn meta-knowledge to compute cardinality in any database. It is generally applicable to any unseen new database to attain high estimation accuracy, while its preparation cost is as little as the basic one-dimensional histogram-based CardEst methods. Moreover, PRICE can be finetuned to further enhance its performance on any specific database. We pretrained PRICE using 30 diverse datasets, completing the process in about 5 hours with a resulting model size of only about 40MB. Evaluations show that PRICE consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest estimation accuracy on several unseen databases and generating faster execution plans with lower overhead. After finetuning with a small volume of databasespecific queries, PRICE could even find plans very close to the optimal ones. Meanwhile, PRICE is generally applicable to different settings such as data updates, data scaling, and query workload shifts. We have made all of our data and codes publicly available at https://github.com/StCarmen/PRICE.
Searching For Music Mixing Graphs: A Pruning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Music mixing is compositional -- experts combine multiple audio processors to achieve a cohesive mix from dry source tracks. We propose a method to reverse engineer this process from the input and output audio. First, we create a mixing console that applies all available processors to every chain. Then, after the initial console parameter optimization, we alternate between removing redundant processors and fine-tuning. We achieve this through differentiable implementation of both processors and pruning. Consequently, we find a sparse mixing graph that achieves nearly identical matching quality of the full mixing console. We apply this procedure to dry-mix pairs from various datasets and collect graphs that also can be used to train neural networks for music mixing applications.
MACT: Model-Agnostic Cross-Lingual Training for Discourse Representation Structure Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Discourse Representation Structure (DRS) is an innovative semantic representation designed to capture the meaning of texts with arbitrary lengths across languages. The semantic representation parsing is essential for achieving natural language understanding through logical forms. Nevertheless, the performance of DRS parsing models remains constrained when trained exclusively on monolingual data. To tackle this issue, we introduce a cross-lingual training strategy. The proposed method is model-agnostic yet highly effective. It leverages cross-lingual training data and fully exploits the alignments between languages encoded in pre-trained language models. The experiments conducted on the standard benchmarks demonstrate that models trained using the cross-lingual training method exhibit significant improvements in DRS clause and graph parsing in English, German, Italian and Dutch. Comparing our final models to previous works, we achieve state-of-the-art results in the standard benchmarks. Furthermore, the detailed analysis provides deep insights into the performance of the parsers, offering inspiration for future research in DRS parsing. We keep updating new results on benchmarks to the appendix.
VIP: Versatile Image Outpainting Empowered by Multimodal Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we focus on resolving the problem of image outpainting, which aims to extrapolate the surrounding parts given the center contents of an image. Although recent works have achieved promising performance, the lack of versatility and customization hinders their practical applications in broader scenarios. Therefore, this work presents a novel image outpainting framework that is capable of customizing the results according to the requirement of users. First of all, we take advantage of a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that automatically extracts and organizes the corresponding textual descriptions of the masked and unmasked part of a given image. Accordingly, the obtained text prompts are introduced to endow our model with the capacity to customize the outpainting results. In addition, a special Cross-Attention module, namely Center-Total-Surrounding (CTS), is elaborately designed to enhance further the the interaction between specific space regions of the image and corresponding parts of the text prompts. Note that unlike most existing methods, our approach is very resource-efficient since it is just slightly fine-tuned on the off-the-shelf stable diffusion (SD) model rather than being trained from scratch. Finally, the experimental results on three commonly used datasets, i.e. Scenery, Building, and WikiArt, demonstrate our model significantly surpasses the SoTA methods. Moreover, versatile outpainting results are listed to show its customized ability.
Object Aware Egocentric Online Action Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Advancements in egocentric video datasets like Ego4D, EPIC-Kitchens, and Ego-Exo4D have enriched the study of first-person human interactions, which is crucial for applications in augmented reality and assisted living. Despite these advancements, current Online Action Detection methods, which efficiently detect actions in streaming videos, are predominantly designed for exocentric views and thus fail to capitalize on the unique perspectives inherent to egocentric videos. To address this gap, we introduce an Object-Aware Module that integrates egocentric-specific priors into existing OAD frameworks, enhancing first-person footage interpretation. Utilizing object-specific details and temporal dynamics, our module improves scene understanding in detecting actions. Validated extensively on the Epic-Kitchens 100 dataset, our work can be seamlessly integrated into existing models with minimal overhead and bring consistent performance enhancements, marking an important step forward in adapting action detection systems to egocentric video analysis.
Synergizing Unsupervised and Supervised Learning: A Hybrid Approach for Accurate Natural Language Task Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

While supervised learning models have shown remarkable performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their success heavily relies on the availability of large-scale labeled datasets, which can be costly and time-consuming to obtain. Conversely, unsupervised learning techniques can leverage abundant unlabeled text data to learn rich representations, but they do not directly optimize for specific NLP tasks. This paper presents a novel hybrid approach that synergizes unsupervised and supervised learning to improve the accuracy of NLP task modeling. While supervised models excel at specific tasks, they rely on large labeled datasets. Unsupervised techniques can learn rich representations from abundant unlabeled text but don't directly optimize for tasks. Our methodology integrates an unsupervised module that learns representations from unlabeled corpora (e.g., language models, word embeddings) and a supervised module that leverages these representations to enhance task-specific models. We evaluate our approach on text classification and named entity recognition (NER), demonstrating consistent performance gains over supervised baselines. For text classification, contextual word embeddings from a language model pretrain a recurrent or transformer-based classifier. For NER, word embeddings initialize a BiLSTM sequence labeler. By synergizing techniques, our hybrid approach achieves SOTA results on benchmark datasets, paving the way for more data-efficient and robust NLP systems.
Learning Adaptive Fusion Bank for Multi-modal Salient Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-modal salient object detection (MSOD) aims to boost saliency detection performance by integrating visible sources with depth or thermal infrared ones. Existing methods generally design different fusion schemes to handle certain issues or challenges. Although these fusion schemes are effective at addressing specific issues or challenges, they may struggle to handle multiple complex challenges simultaneously. To solve this problem, we propose a novel adaptive fusion bank that makes full use of the complementary benefits from a set of basic fusion schemes to handle different challenges simultaneously for robust MSOD. We focus on handling five major challenges in MSOD, namely center bias, scale variation, image clutter, low illumination, and thermal crossover or depth ambiguity. The fusion bank proposed consists of five representative fusion schemes, which are specifically designed based on the characteristics of each challenge, respectively. The bank is scalable, and more fusion schemes could be incorporated into the bank for more challenges. To adaptively select the appropriate fusion scheme for multi-modal input, we introduce an adaptive ensemble module that forms the adaptive fusion bank, which is embedded into hierarchical layers for sufficient fusion of different source data. Moreover, we design an indirect interactive guidance module to accurately detect salient hollow objects via the skip integration of high-level semantic information and low-level spatial details. Extensive experiments on three RGBT datasets and seven RGBD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the outstanding performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The code and results are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/LAFB.
Formal Definition and Implementation of Reproducibility Tenets for Computational Workflows
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Computational workflow management systems power contemporary data-intensive sciences. The slowly resolving reproducibility crisis presents both a sobering warning and an opportunity to iterate on what science and data processing entails. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's largest radio telescope, is among the most extensive scientific projects underway and presents grand scientific collaboration and data-processing challenges. In this work, we aim to improve the ability of workflow management systems to facilitate reproducible, high-quality science. This work presents a scale and system-agnostic computational workflow model and extends five well-known reproducibility concepts into seven well-defined tenets for this workflow model. Additionally, we present a method to construct workflow execution signatures using cryptographic primitives in amortized constant time. We combine these three concepts and provide a concrete implementation in Data Activated Flow Graph Engine (DALiuGE), a workflow management system for the SKA to embed specific provenance information into workflow signatures, demonstrating the possibility of facilitating automatic formal verification of scientific quality in amortized constant time. We validate our approach with a simple yet representative astronomical processing task: filtering a noisy signal with a lowpass filter using CPU and GPU methods. This example shows the practicality and efficacy of combining formal tenet definitions with a workflow signature generation mechanism. Our framework, spanning formal UML specification, principled provenance information collection based on reproducibility tenets, and finally, a concrete example implementation in DALiuGE illuminates otherwise obscure scientific discrepancies and similarities between principally identical workflow executions.
Zero-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection with Outlier Label Exposure
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

As vision-language models like CLIP are widely applied to zero-shot tasks and gain remarkable performance on in-distribution (ID) data, detecting and rejecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs in the zero-shot setting have become crucial for ensuring the safety of using such models on the fly. Most existing zero-shot OOD detectors rely on ID class label-based prompts to guide CLIP in classifying ID images and rejecting OOD images. In this work we instead propose to leverage a large set of diverse auxiliary outlier class labels as pseudo OOD class text prompts to CLIP for enhancing zero-shot OOD detection, an approach we called Outlier Label Exposure (OLE). The key intuition is that ID images are expected to have lower similarity to these outlier class prompts than OOD images. One issue is that raw class labels often include noise labels, e.g., synonyms of ID labels, rendering raw OLE-based detection ineffective. To address this issue, we introduce an outlier prototype learning module that utilizes the prompt embeddings of the outlier labels to learn a small set of pivotal outlier prototypes for an embedding similarity-based OOD scoring. Additionally, the outlier classes and their prototypes can be loosely coupled with the ID classes, leading to an inseparable decision region between them. Thus, we also introduce an outlier label generation module that synthesizes our outlier prototypes and ID class embeddings to generate in-between outlier prototypes to further calibrate the detection in OLE. Despite its simplicity, extensive experiments show that OLE substantially improves detection performance and achieves new state-of-the-art performance in large-scale OOD and hard OOD detection benchmarks.
Demonstration Augmentation for Zero-shot In-context Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive capability known as In-context Learning (ICL), which enables them to acquire knowledge from textual demonstrations without the need for parameter updates. However, many studies have highlighted that the model's performance is sensitive to the choice of demonstrations, presenting a significant challenge for practical applications where we lack prior knowledge of user queries. Consequently, we need to construct an extensive demonstration pool and incorporate external databases to assist the model, leading to considerable time and financial costs. In light of this, some recent research has shifted focus towards zero-shot ICL, aiming to reduce the model's reliance on external information by leveraging their inherent generative capabilities. Despite the effectiveness of these approaches, the content generated by the model may be unreliable, and the generation process is time-consuming. To address these issues, we propose Demonstration Augmentation for In-context Learning (DAIL), which employs the model's previously predicted historical samples as demonstrations for subsequent ones. DAIL brings no additional inference cost and does not rely on the model's generative capabilities. Our experiments reveal that DAIL can significantly improve the model's performance over direct zero-shot inference and can even outperform few-shot ICL without any external information.
EduNLP: Towards a Unified and Modularized Library for Educational Resources
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Educational resource understanding is vital to online learning platforms, which have demonstrated growing applications recently. However, researchers and developers always struggle with using existing general natural language toolkits or domain-specific models. The issue raises a need to develop an effective and easy-to-use one that benefits AI education-related research and applications. To bridge this gap, we present a unified, modularized, and extensive library, EduNLP, focusing on educational resource understanding. In the library, we decouple the whole workflow to four key modules with consistent interfaces including data configuration, processing, model implementation, and model evaluation. We also provide a configurable pipeline to unify the data usage and model usage in standard ways, where users can customize their own needs. For the current version, we primarily provide 10 typical models from four categories, and 5 common downstream-evaluation tasks in the education domain on 8 subjects for users' usage. The project is released at: https://github.com/bigdata-ustc/EduNLP.
Focus on the Core: Efficient Attention via Pruned Token Compression for Document Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Transformer-based models have achieved dominant performance in numerous NLP tasks. Despite their remarkable successes, pre-trained transformers such as BERT suffer from a computationally expensive self-attention mechanism that interacts with all tokens, including the ones unfavorable to classification performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose integrating two strategies: token pruning and token combining. Token pruning eliminates less important tokens in the attention mechanism's key and value as they pass through the layers. Additionally, we adopt fuzzy logic to handle uncertainty and alleviate potential mispruning risks arising from an imbalanced distribution of each token's importance. Token combining, on the other hand, condenses input sequences into smaller sizes in order to further compress the model. By integrating these two approaches, we not only improve the model's performance but also reduce its computational demands. Experiments with various datasets demonstrate superior performance compared to baseline models, especially with the best improvement over the existing BERT model, achieving +5%p in accuracy and +5.6%p in F1 score. Additionally, memory cost is reduced to 0.61x, and a speedup of 1.64x is achieved.
Large Language Models as Recommender Systems: A Study of Popularity Bias
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The issue of popularity bias -- where popular items are disproportionately recommended, overshadowing less popular but potentially relevant items -- remains a significant challenge in recommender systems. Recent advancements have seen the integration of general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) into the architecture of such systems. This integration raises concerns that it might exacerbate popularity bias, given that the LLM's training data is likely dominated by popular items. However, it simultaneously presents a novel opportunity to address the bias via prompt tuning. Our study explores this dichotomy, examining whether LLMs contribute to or can alleviate popularity bias in recommender systems. We introduce a principled way to measure popularity bias by discussing existing metrics and proposing a novel metric that fulfills a series of desiderata. Based on our new metric, we compare a simple LLM-based recommender to traditional recommender systems on a movie recommendation task. We find that the LLM recommender exhibits less popularity bias, even without any explicit mitigation.
Sequence-to-Sequence Multi-Modal Speech In-Painting
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speech in-painting is the task of regenerating missing audio contents using reliable context information. Despite various recent studies in multi-modal perception of audio in-painting, there is still a need for an effective infusion of visual and auditory information in speech in-painting. In this paper, we introduce a novel sequence-to-sequence model that leverages the visual information to in-paint audio signals via an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder plays the role of a lip-reader for facial recordings and the decoder takes both encoder outputs as well as the distorted audio spectrograms to restore the original speech. Our model outperforms an audio-only speech in-painting model and has comparable results with a recent multi-modal speech in-painter in terms of speech quality and intelligibility metrics for distortions of 300 ms to 1500 ms duration, which proves the effectiveness of the introduced multi-modality in speech in-painting.